Baby Formula? There’s a Cyber attack For that!

Hackers are portrayed as technical marvels who apparently, according to various media outlets sit in a dark room and infiltrate top-secret government networks in order to steal information or plunder vast financial institutions before running off, ok flying off, ok clicking a mouse button and pressing shut down, but still making off with their ill-gotten gains.

Well according to the Albuquerque Journal, no I haven’t made this name up, have reported that three teenage boys who attend V. Sue Cleveland High have allegedly orchestrated a Cyber Attack into the Enfamil baby formula website using a school computer and their own device. The synopsis of the story centres on the three boys who had a little bit of free time while attending their school’s robotics class, while looking at various websites they allegedly came across the Enfamil live chat site and in their wisdom, or lack of, decided to harass the forum members with various questions which started benignly but became more aggressive.

This continued from May 13 – 18 until Enfamil informed them they would be blocked, well that did not go down well as allegedly the three boys posted the website of Enfamil on a hacker website which in turn allegedly took the site down.

With the information presented so far, I do feel the three teenagers were only partly culpable for the alleged Cyber Attack; yes they posted the website on a Hacker forum but they did not undertake the Cyber Attack themselves but rather asked others to carry out the attack which does sound like a DDoS technique.

I also feel a comment by the district that Enfamil was not blocked by the Internet Filter because it did not fall into a banned category to be laughable. Many websites which are hacked are not prohibited or inappropriate i.e. Sony, although The Interview could have been blocked for being utter drivel. It also demonstrates the Internet can place people or in this case teenagers in an artificially powerful position where actions can result in real world consequences.